Product Design and Development in interdisciplinary Teams (PDDiT)
MOB-3578
This course, first taught in the Fall term of 2008, takes teams of undergraduate students through the entire process of product development from market and
user research to product design and prototype manufacturing. Along the way student teams engage in a wide variety of activities, such as
ethnographic user studies, idea generation, concept development and refinement, prototyping, and manufacturing. Projects are student-generated.
This is a truly interdisciplinary course; it is run in collaboration with an Engineering
School and a Design School. The students are put into cross-functional teams (business, engineering, and industrial design) to work on their product development projects, each team has at least one member from each school, often two, sometimes three. The teaching team is also cross-disciplinary.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The course, which is usually offered in the Fall semester, will NOT be offered in Fall 2012. The next time this course will be offered in Fall 2013.
Prerequisites: OEM, and preferably either User-oriented Collaborative Design (UOCD at Olin College of Engineering) or Social Entrepreneurship by Design (EPS4527).
The course is an elective of the undergraduate concentration Technology Entrepreneurship and Design
(TED). For more information on the concentration, please see bottom
of this page.
Social Entrepreneurship by Design (SED)
EPS-4527 (formerly EPS-3527)
This course integrates user-oriented collaborative design and entrepreneurship for the purpose of developing new products or services that contribute to the solution of a social problem. User-oriented collaborative design is a proven five phase process designed to help you create products or services based on user needs; understanding the user is central to the design process. Yet designing new products and services for social sectors adds layers of complexity. The user is one among many stakeholders to which your product must provide value. Thus you will design products that yield both an economic and social value for multiple stakeholder groups, but you must determine who the most important stakeholders are and focus wisely in the design process. Determining economic and social value is an entrepreneurship exercise. In Social Entrepreneurship by Design, students aim to uncover and design potential value for all critical stakeholders. This is critical because addressing social problems typically requires collaboration, partnerships, alliances and even special funding. The chief aim of the course is to understand and apply a design process with far-reaching implications for social activists and social entrepreneurs. While the problems of the world are large, the course forces students to focus on challenges that are narrowly-defined and potentially solvable. Because the course is experiential, students are expected to engage multiple stakeholders to motivate their entrepreneurial approaches and solutions.
The course focuses on one broad social problem space every year.
Prerequisites: MCE
Co-requisite: EPS3501
The Concentration Technology Entrepreneurship and Design (TED)
In summer of 2008 Babson created a new concentration for its undergraduate students. Named Technology Entrepreneurship and Design, it creates a coherent set of courses around the fast developing topics technology and design in the context of Entrepreneurship.
Both PDDiT and SED courses are part of the TED concentration. You can find general information on all concentrations at Babson here, and on the new concentration TED here.
